Women Nurses of the Civil War

Introduction by Mrs. John A. Logan

The hospitals established by the Empress Helena in the fifth
century were an evidence of Christian feeling; and it was the
same Christianity and humanity which actuated Margaret Fuller
and Florence Nightingale when in Italy and in the Crimean War
they nursed the wounded soldiers. That same Christian spirit
sent women, young and old, grave and gay, to the hospitals where
our "Boys in Blue" needed their assistance. Bravely they
wrought, and often bravely they fell by the side of those whom
they nursed, martyrs to the cause of liberty as well as the men
who fell in the defense of freedom and the Union. Rev. Doctor
Bellows, referring to them and their noble work, said: "A
grander collection of women, whether considered in their
intellectual or moral qualities, their heads or their hearts, I
have not had the happiness of knowing, than the women I saw in
the hospitals. They were the flower of their sex. Great as were
the labors of those who superintended the operations at home of
collecting and preparing sup-plies for the hospitals and the
fields, I cannot but think that the women who lived in the
hospitals or among the soldiers required a force of character
and a glow of devotion and self-sacrifice of a rarer kind. They
were the heroines. They conquered their feminine sensibility at
the sight of blood and wounds, lived coarsely and dressed and
slept rudely; they studied the caprices of men to whom their
ties were simply humane, men often ignorant, feeble-minded, out
of their senses, raving with pain and fever; they had a still
harder service in bearing with the pride, the official arrogance
and the hardness or the folly, perhaps the impertinence and
presumption, of half-trained medical men, whom the urgencies of
the case had fastened on the service. Nothing in the power of
the nation to give or to say can ever compare for a moment with
the proud satisfaction which every brave soldier who has ever
risked his life for his country ever after carries in his heart
of hearts; and no public recognition, no thanks from a saved
nation can ever add anything of much importance to the rewards
of those who tasted the actual joy of ministering with their own
hands and hearts to the wants of our sick and dying men."

It, nevertheless, is to our great regret that only the
biographies of those nurses whose services were most conspicuous
can be included in this volume. In place of the longer mention
of each, which would bring this work to unreasonable length, the
following list of these brave women is offered.

Mrs. Eliza C. Porter, of the noble band of
western women who devoted kind thought and untiring exertion to
the care of our country's defenders.

Mrs. John Harris, the wife of a Philadelphia
physician, who was at the front all during the war, and who
returned home an invalid for the rest of her life from the
effects of a sunstroke, received while in attendance on a field
hospital in Virginia.

Margaret Elizabeth Breckenridge, who said at
the opening of the conflict, ''I shall never be satisfied till I
get right into a hospital to live until the war is over,'' and
who fulfilled this lofty ambition in her work in the hospitals
in and around St. Louis during all the long and bloody conflict.

Mrs. Stephen Barker, wife of the chaplain of
the First Massachusetts Heavy Artillery, who went to the front
with her husband and, for nearly two years, continued in
unremitting attendance upon the regimental hospitals.

Amy M. Bradley who, having gone south to seek
her own health, remained during the four years of the war,
nursing her fellow-countrymen of the North.

Mrs. Arabella G. Barlow, of New Jersey, sealed
her devotion to her country's cause by the sublimes sacrifice of
which woman is capable, and after nursing her wounded husband
until his death, remained to care for the other soldiers until
she died of fever contracted while in attendance in the
hospitals of the army of the Potomac.

Mrs. Nellie Maria Taylor who, though living in
that part of the country which had borne the rank weeds of
secession, proved her loyalty and patriotism in the care of
Union soldiers at her own house.

Miss
Clara Davis, (afterwards the wife of Rev. Edward Abbott,
of Cambridge)
Mrs. Harriet Foote Hawley, (the wife of Brevet
Major-General Hawley, late Gover-nor of Connecticut, and
afterwards U. S. Senator from Connecticut)
Mrs. Mary Morris Husband, (Granddaughter of Robert
Morris, the great financier of the Revolutionary War)

All these women are mentioned as heroic and efficient nurses in
"Women's Work in the Civil War,'' and to that book the reader
must be commended for further knowledge of them.

Besides those whose names have been published in books there
were many more, school teachers, who spent their vacations in
the hospitals, and women who were content to be the angels of
mercy to the suffering soldiers, but whose names have not been
scattered far and wide, though their labors were appreciated As
someone has said: "The recording angel, thank Heaven, knows them
all,'' and, "their labor was not in vain in the Lord." Surely
the women of that portion of the last century given over to the
war are women of whom the nation may well be proud, and whose
memories should be cherished

When the war was over there was still work for the women to do
in training the freedmen, and especially their children ; and
the noble women who had been nurses, and many who had not,
enlisted in this philanthropic and trying enterprise with the
same zeal and self-sacrifice that had been shown by the women in
the hospitals. They wrought also among the families of the
soldiers and among the refugees who were homeless and destitute
while war devastated the land. The niece of the poet Whittier
was among them, bearing a name sacred to all lovers of freedom,
because John G. Whittier's lyrics had so earnestly pleaded for
the freedom of the slaves. Anna Gardner was a teacher of colored
children on her native island of Nantucket when the
Abolitionists were ostracized. She taught one of the first
normal schools ever established for colored girls, and doubtless
gave invaluable service in training the Negroes of the South to
become teachers for their own race.

After long years of silence, the American Tract Society at last
gave the meed of praise to Christian effort without regard to
race or color, when it published its sketch of Mary S. Peake, a
free colored woman, who was the first teacher of her race at
Fortress Monroe.

Mrs. Frances D. Gage, a woman of Ohio birth,
but of New England parentage, in her writings dealt powerful
blows for freedom, temperance and other reforms. She had lived
the life of a philanthropist, and when the war broke out she
gave voice and pen to the right, speaking, editing and writing.
When the Proclamation of Emancipation was issued she freed
herself from other cares, and found her mission among the freed
slaves. Four of her own boys were in the Union Army, and in the
autumn of 1862 she went, without appointment or salary, to Port
Royal, where she labored fourteen months. She returned North in
1863 and lectured on her experiences among the freedmen, rousing
others to labor for the welfare of the colored race. Her name
will live forever among the noble and faithful women who
"remembered those in bounds as bound with them," and who cared
for the soldier and the f reedman, to whom God had already said:
"Well done, good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy
of thy Lord."

Mrs. Lucy Gaylord Powers was another true
friend to the soldier and the freedman. Her last active
benevolent work was begun in 1863. This was the foundation of an
asylum at the capital for the freed orphans and destitute aged
colored women, whom the war and the Emancipation Proclamation
had thrown upon the country as a charge. But she was in feeble
health, and died while on her way to Albany on July 20, 1863.

Maria Rullann, of Massachusetts, proved herself
worthy of her kinship to the first secretary of the Board of
Education in that commonwealth by her faithful service as a
teacher and philanthropist in Helena, Arkansas, and afterward as
a teacher in Washington and Georgetown.

Mrs. Josephine Griffin, always an advocate for
freedom, was faithful in her nursing during the war, and
afterward took charge of the good work in Washington. One of her
philanthropic methods was the finding of good places for
domestic servants, from time to time taking numbers of them to
various northern and western cities, and placing them in homes.
The cost of these expeditions she provided almost entirely from
her own means, her daughters helping her as far as possible in
her noble work.

There were great numbers of other women equally efficient in the
freedmen's schools and homes, but their work was mainly under
the direction of the American Union Commission, and it is
impossible, therefore, to obtain accounts of their labors as
individuals. It is all a tale of self-sacrifice and heroism.
There were heroic women North and South, and if, as someone has
said, "An heroic woman is almost an object of worship,'' there
are many shrines today for the devotees of physical and moral
heroism to visit in following the history of the good women of
the Civil War.

The women of Gettysburg won for themselves a high and honorable
record for their faithfulness to the flag and their generosity
and devotion to the wounded. Chief among these, since she gave
her life for the cause, was Mrs. Jennie Wade, who continued her
generous work of baking bread for the army until a shot killed
her instantly. A southern officer of high rank was killed almost
at the same moment near her door, and his troops hastily
constructing a rude coffin, were about to place the body of
their commander in it for burial when, in the swaying to and fro
of the armies, a Union column drove them from the ground.
Finding Mrs. Wade dead, they placed her in the coffin intended
for the officer. In that coffin she was buried the next day,
followed to the grave by hundreds of tearful mourners, who knew
her courage and kindness of heart. The loyal women of Richmond
were a noble band, and they never faltered in their allegiance
to the flag nor in their sympathy and services to the Union
prisoners at Libby, Belle Isle and Castle Thunder. With the aid
of twenty-one loyal white men in Richmond they raised a fund of
thirteen thousand dollars in gold to aid Union prisoners, while
their gifts of clothing, food and luxuries were of much greater
value. Moreover, had we space, many pages might be filled with
the heroic deeds of noble southern women who believed in the
cause for which their husbands stood, and who sacrificed their
homes and all that was most dear during the Civil War, and who
worked prodigiously trying to contrive ways and means with which
to relieve the sufferings which abounded everywhere in the
southland. Their improvised hospitals were poorly supplied with
the bare necessities for the relief of the sick and wounded. In
and out of hospitals, the demands upon the humane were
heartrending; but to the very last heroism characterized the
women as well as the bravest of the men who fought and died in
the cause of the Confederacy.